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FLOTUS: Museums Not Welcoming to ‘Someone Who Looks Like Me’
New York’s elite dedicated a $420 million building for the Whitney Museum on Monday. The event featured various luminaries and politicians, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, celebritect Renzo Piano, and Michelle Obama. [Editor’s note: Welcome, Rush listeners! if you’re reading this article, you ought to be a Ricochet member. Join up here today].
Instead of merely congratulating the museum staff and praising their mission, the First Lady decided to lecture them about diversity. One of her claims struck me as quite odd:
“You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood. In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.”
In a story on her speech, public radio station WNYC identified the vast majority of American museums as “white spaces” that are inherently unwelcoming to minorities.
I have been to several Chicago museums on many occasions. Whether I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, or the Museum of Science and Industry, the bustling crowds were made up of every ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Buses brought in schoolkids from each neighborhood in Chicago and every ‘burb surrounding it. I’m sure a young Michelle Obama participated in similar field trips many times.
And it’s not as if she grew up in poverty, relegated to the South Side’s infamous housing projects like some of my friends. The First Lady had a thoroughly middle-class upbringing in a stable, nuclear family. Her excellent grades got her into Chicago’s superb Whitney Young Magnet High School where she was given one of the finest secondary educations in the state.
Did this smart, successful student actually think Chicago’s many popular museums were closed to “someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood?” Did she “never in a million years dream” she would be welcome in these cultural centers, even though her school must have had field trips to most of them? I find this very hard to believe.
Michelle Obama has had a remarkably successful life. From all accounts, she was a happy, high-achieving child, earned degrees at Princeton and Harvard, was the wife of a U.S. Senator and now lives in the world’s most famous mansion. She graces magazine covers, is lauded on television shows, and even gets invited to speak at the dedication of high-end art museums.
So why does she continue to identify herself and “people like her” as oppressed, aggrieved victims rather than strong, capable winners? I know it’s de rigueur to make every issue a “teachable moment,” but is there any indication that America’s many museums are “off-limits to people of color?”
Published in Culture
Maybe if we named her permanent Queen of the United States she would feel like she’s finally getting a fair shake.
I think it’s also important to remember that her perception of that Target experience went from positive to negative over time. On Letterman soon afterwards, it’s all smiles and something like “no one recognized me and I am tall so I helped a little old lady”. After a few years and some amount of racial strife in the country, it became something like “the typical white folks just expected that I worked there”. Disheartening all over again to think of it.
Finally, a woman of color can own a boat.
There’s so much more we can do, but this is a sure sign of progress. Fight the power!
It might be in the individual’s best interests not to firebomb a CVS, let alone The Collective’s interest.
Here’s an idea: Children raised in fatherless families will struggle to find self-worth, because a piece of the raising a child puzzle was missing from their lives. Abandonment rarely elevates the self-worth levels in children.
And then you have adults who feel like nobody wants them when someone looks sideways at them at a CVS, and then all you need is a reason and a match, and then you’ve got FLOTUS talking about museums.
Families. Education. It’s not that hard.
Psssst! Michelle, it’s the WhitNey museum, not the Whitey museum.
FLOTUS maybe correct in her analysis because it takes a certain level of vicarious ability and intellectual sophistication to review, examine, analyze, consider and evaluate museum exhibitions and give paucity of thinking demonstrated by her utterances I the past she is clearly not suited for museums.
Just when I think Barack Obama is the most annoying human on the planet, Michelle Obama opens her mouth and proves me wrong.
Off topic but can’t museums be about the art? Can’t reading to your kids be about a good story? Can kids paint or draw just because it’s fun? Can’t a good school be about teaching kids to read and write? Does everything have to have some second level advantage or it’s no good. Do parents have to weigh out every decision whether or not it advantages their kid in the future? Get’s him or her a better job or more money?
It must be tough being a Democrat/Progressive measuring and analyzing seemingly simple life choices: breakfast cereal or oatmeal, red or blue shirt, and think about your or your children’s future, 5, 10, 20 years down the road. No wonder they hate everything.
.. Oh, and I agree with Jackie Kennedy, “First Lady” sounds like a race horse. In Michelle Obama’s case it, a little more than that.
A little less than a race horse, actually. At least a little less than a complete one.
Right. About half.